The Bramme chair, cut from one sheet of birch with no fasteners

One standard sheet of birch plywood, interlocking slotted joints, no screws. A chair that ships flat and assembles in under 90 seconds.

One sheet, one cut plan

The Bramme chair comes from a single sheet of birch plywood, 2440 by 1220 millimetres, the standard sheet size from the mill we source from in Ostrobothnia. Every part of the finished chair, seat, back, two side frames, and the cross brace, is cut from that one sheet on a CNC router, with the offcuts small enough to fit in one hand. Waste from a finished Bramme chair runs under 8 percent of the sheet by weight, low for a chair this size.

The name comes from the Swedish word for a slab, the flat plank shape the parts start as before assembly folds them into a seat.

No fasteners, no glue at the joints

The chair holds together through interlocking slotted joints cut directly into the plywood, the same finger-joint logic used in flat-pack furniture for decades, refined here so the joints tighten under load rather than working loose. There are no screws, no bolts, no visible fasteners anywhere in the finished piece. A single locking wedge at the rear cross brace, also cut from the same sheet, is the only part that is not structural plywood doing double duty as both frame and connector.

That decision was not aesthetic first. It came from a practical constraint: the chair needed to ship flat and be assembled by one person with no tools, in under 90 seconds. Removing fasteners removed the one step that normally needs a screwdriver and a second pair of hands.

Why birch

Birch plywood takes a CNC-cut slot cleanly, without the splintering that shows up in cheaper composite boards at tight tolerances. The species also grows locally along this coast, which kept the supply chain to a single regional mill rather than an imported material. A finished chair weighs 4.2 kilograms and holds a static load of 150 kilograms, tested to the same standard as a commercial-grade dining chair despite using less material than a typical four-legged design.

What one sheet forces you to decide

Working from a fixed sheet size is a constraint most furniture design avoids. It forced early decisions that a freer material budget would have let us defer: the chair's exact seat depth, its back height, and its leg splay were all set by how the parts nested on the sheet before a single prototype existed. Later prototypes changed almost nothing about those dimensions, because the nesting diagram had already solved the proportions.

The chair has been in production for the studio's own use since we built the first working prototype, and it now ships to a small number of outside clients who ask for it after seeing it in our own spaces.

What happens to the offcuts

The 8 percent of the sheet left over after cutting is not scrap by default. It gets sorted into a bin at the workshop and used for smaller fittings, coat hooks, drawer pulls, the occasional side table leg, so the studio's own furniture line runs on almost nothing beyond what a Bramme chair batch already produces. Over a production run of 40 chairs, the offcut bin from that batch alone has been enough to finish a full set of coat hooks for our Vaasa studio's entry hall.